Quote Originally Posted by overgrowthegovt
This has been seriously getting me down lately, and I'm curious as to your perspectives on this topic, and how severe you think this social illness is.

From what I've been observing, a depressing amount of people are content to live their termite lives in unquestioning intellectual sterility, devouring reality TV (and any other empty distraction), cultural and governmental propaganda, etc. They assert their values to you in a self-assured display of pedantry, values that have been hammered into them from the cradle and never examined. It seems everyone was either raised by a conservative fool or a liberal fool, with no capacity to look at things as they are, undiluted by some ideological piss filter. General knowledge, grammatical savvy, aesthetic appreciation...all these seem to be on the severe decline. Oh, and let's not forget 90% of the population's addiction to conspicuous consumption of useless status symbols.

My food for debate here is...shouldn't humans be smarter than this? I recognize not everybody's going to be Rimbaud, but I really think people could be educated in critical thinking, propaganda resistence, applied philosophy, etc. if only mainstream institutions weren't so reliant on the comatose mentality for their very survival.
I think in the todays human society people MUST be this dumb, or the society would just collapse down... the society we live today is SO absurd that only dumb people can live into it (and like it and agree with it and spend their entire lives working for the benefit of it)... thats why the "system" (media+government+enforcement+etc) needs to keep people being this dumb.
And more the society grows, dumber it must keep its citizens...

Or, maybe its just you that is getting more intelligent, and so from your own viewpoint the rest of mankind is getting (relatively) dumber... there happened something similar to this with me when i started to smoke and started to see everything with different eyes...